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After Claude (Paperback)

Description

Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, "the French rat." That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it's Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge--or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it's easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women's lives and hearts--until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.

About the Author

Emily Prager is the author of three novels, "Clea & Zeus Divorce, Eve's Tattoo," and the recently published "Roger Fishbite," as well as the acclaimed book of short stories "A Visit from the Footbinder," and a compendium of her humorous writings," In the Missionary Positions," She has been a satirical columnist for "The Village Voice, The New York Observer," and "The New York Times," as well as London's "Daily Telegraph "and" The Guardian," She is a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library, and in 2000 she won the first Online Journalism Award for Commentary given by the Columbia University Graduate School of Jounalism. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Lithuania, and Israel. She teaches humor writing at New York University, and lives in Greenwich Village.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

Praise For…

"Like our best women writers (Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates), Owens is not afraid to take risks...Owens is a highly intelligent writer and a fiendishly sardonic one--to the extent that her outrageous wit rescues her freaky Jewish anti-heroine from becoming a pain in the Asphalt Jungle. On every page wisecracks explode like anti-personnel mines. We laugh, nervously perhaps, but often." —Newsweek

“One of the earliest portraits of the female antihero, a sort of distaff Notes From Underground. It was very funny” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

“A very funny book by a exhilarating talent.” —The New York Times

“…like watching a woman depilate with an acetylene touch.” —Newsweek

“Good enough to have convulsed the late Oscar Levant, barbed, bitchy and hilariously sour.” —Kenneth Tynan

“Owens, under the name of Harriet Daimler, was a prominent Parisian pornographer for Olympia Press…[who] as 'Harriet Daimler', became one of Girodias's most celebrated pornographers, someone who struggled 'against her impossible tendency to write more explicitly than the courts will tolerate’” —Bloomsbury Magazine

“To characterize After Claude as the inevitable lightly veiled autobiography of a ‘first’ novel is to deny Ms. Owens her due both as a savagely accurate reporter of the current Greenwich Village-Chelsea Hotel scene, and as a gallow humorist of major order...After Claude...is said, with biting verve and accuracy for New York that Mary McCarthy and her reliance on ‘facts’ would well envy.” —Eleanor Rackow Widmer, Arts and Society